Ad Infinitum
by Parallaxm
Summary: "The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it." A meditation on the infamous, all-knowing (well, not quite) man.


**Ad Infinitum**

_and so on and so forth_

.

.

.

Orihara Izaya eyes the snow-globe in his palm with keen unconcern, trailing the flakes as they waltz into heated collisions, frenzied then fatigued.  
The profound warmth of contempt stews in his gut, and the swivel chair creaks as he plops down.

He's not attached to the familiarity of the action, but he won't complain, given a quiet, undisturbed space. He would just as willingly settle down on the curb of a sidewalk, provided that this sidewalk was twenty-eight stories above ground. The viewpoint is nonnegotiable; the rest is a matter of preference.

Whoever said that night obscured a truth exhumed by day?

It's quite simple.

He doesn't have to part the blinds to inform you of the gathered shoppers milling about the rain-slicked streets of Shinjuku, waiting to pounce on the New Year sale as soon as the clock strikes twelve. No one wants to be trampled to death, so they all come early (tragedy of the commons, or endearing stupidity). He doesn't have to see them to visualize their faces, basking in the neon glow of store fronts and holiday lights. And he doesn't have to prove it (the skeptical will, on their own accord), but he could tell you that approximately one third of the shoppers clutching oversized handbags that would put Marry Poppins to shame are actually anxious to return whatever gift horse they stared in the mouth and paid lip service to on Christmas day.

If anything, daylight dissipates a truth made vulnerable by darkness.

The sky is a baleful shade of bluish black, an inky viscosity, and he welcomes it. Lies and fears evaporate from the ground as predawn fog, pooling at the ankles of the mindless.

It keeps them grounded. Deception, that is. Or optimism, if you like.

The fog thickens, livened by the dim roar of a bustling city too preoccupied to heed the grunts and whirs of engines and sirens in the distance—a testament to the tedious chaos of scattered normality. But normality and abnormality are not flip sides of the same coin. They're eyeglass prescriptions, issued by ostensible authorities on the human eye so that a blinded citizen might see in shades of right or wrong, clear or unfocused. Everything is a blur without a standard to cling to.

The setup is music to his ears; an unfinished symphony, all his to ruin or rescue.

Sonohara Anri hadn't the faintest idea of what she partook in simply by being.  
She supposed confronting her fears had been a marked development, but the poor girl didn't have a fucking clue.

Yesterday implies today, today implies tomorrow, and it is all expected. It is celebrated periodically; it is a normal bell curve, the frequency of life.

Do grass buds celebrate their return come spring?

No. They quietly go about their business of being eaten, breeze-bent, trampled, and withered.

Sure, they also glisten with dew and wax pastoral on a summer afternoon. But it's the poets who brandish romance with a flourish, anthropomorphizing left and right. He can't blame them, really—would you rather liken a flaming sunset to a lava pit, or the wrath of a thousand writhing souls, desperately warring for salvation in the waning light?

Rhetorical question.

A sentient being would likely answer with the latter. As Shinra would postulate: "like dissolves like."

Humans are _his _solution. Most assume the issue to be his existence.

"Don't you have anything better to do?" Namie inquires in that droll, unimpressed way of hers.

_Ah, but that's the thing, _he muses. _No one does—so they resort to irrationality. _

Izaya holds his breath as the globe rolls away from his fingertips, reuniting with the hard surface of the desk in a splintering cry of euphoria. "_You see?_" he wants to sneer, but can't (no storyteller interrupts the bumbling protagonist and divests the reader of dramatic irony; it's an inveterate law of sadism). They're all _begging _him to turn the snow-globe on its head, to get a few cracks in that'll strain like spider veins and bleed their anticlimaxes dry.

But he's not selfless. It's pointless to be, from an agnostic point of view. He doesn't foot any bills for karma; he foots the bill because he is inclined to, and his inclinations are driven by immense foresight. He's not their satyr play sandwiched between the self-wrought tragedies of humdrum days.

The jester owes his prestige to the king's court, but a joker dances freely on the king's grave.

It's a subtle distinction, but subtlety is underrated.

A shard of grass crunches beneath the heel of her knee-high boots, and he swivels around with an aftertaste of amusement in his mouth.  
Namie glances at the corpse of the snow-globe, then to its murderer (or, as he would argue, its liberator).

"The question is," she drawls, brusque as usual, "are you prepared to burn in the hell of your own havoc?"

The information broker laughs, heartened by her unwitting redundancy. His secretary is two years his senior, but the concept of time has never particularly threatened him. Why would it, when its end implies a far better place? (He is admittedly undecided about this hypothesis, however, and the submerged head on the back shelf hadn't proffered any hints.)

"I was _born _to burn," he replies, all smiles, and the brunette can only sigh.

He marvels for just a moment, then adds, "Humans are remarkably adept at sighing. You would think it has an evolutionary advantage, given that." He flicks out his blade, gathering the fragmented reality of water and snow and glass, scraping it off of his desk in one sweep. "Or are they so besotted with defeat that they found a way to vocalize it in a universal language?"

Izaya swipes at the remaining puddle, shredding wisps of wood from his desk in the process. He grins, catching her eye.  
She begrudgingly holds his gaze, though they both know she'd rather not, as a general rule. "After all, what's universal is universally forgivable."

He cleans up his messes—he's not irresponsible. On the contrary, Orihara Izaya can be held _entirely_ accountable for his actions.

Which is to say that he knows what he's doing.

.

_etc._

_._

After swinging by the seedy headquarters of the Yellow Scarves to rig the election of their new leader (blackmail never retired), Izaya returns to his lofty office at an unusually early hour. The color gangs are woefully short-sighted, and he wonders if his players will ever hit the jackpot and realize they're only up against the slot machine.

He hasn't installed infrared motion sensors, because the premise of security invites breaking and entering, and the notion bores him to death. Power struggles are only amusing when they're unsuspected or grossly misinterpreted by the struggling parties. More often than not, the lack of suspicion cultivates betrayal, forgery, and other blooming bombshells with their petals precariously perched to fall.

It's one of those hushed moments.

The message board is deserted, Namie is nowhere to be seen, and it's too early for rush hour traffic.

Right then, a newcomer posts.

"Do you believe in divine judgment?"

He reacts with an undignified cackle. The Valkyrie dilemma doesn't occur to him at the mention of the divine because he blocks it out. The ability not to dwell on certain matters comes in handy when he's thinking on his feet, as it grants him more focus and brain capacity to sift through (_obsessively_, Namie would mutter) the unfiltered content in the lives of his playthings. What they seek, but cannot face, he sees. He will never turn a blind eye to the unknown—what else are eyes for?

But he ponders the question, all the same.

He's familiar with Genesis. It's bad form to ridicule what you haven't experienced, after all.

A serpent tempts Eve's disobedience. The emphasis is placed on the transgression.

He doesn't see it that way.

A serpent tempts curiosity with knowledge. He places the emphasis on what has been transcended in the transformation, what has evolved.  
Eve was blind, Eve was _informed_, Eve could see, and in seeing, Eve was condemned.

Thus convinced, he concludes: the moral of the story is that no good deed goes unpunished.

At least, if you're seeking truth.

Not _the _truth, just truth.

.

_etc._

.

The former shogun spews gritty, terse insults in his face on the message boards. It has become a habit, and those are largely uninteresting. But it occurs to Izaya that perhaps he ought to be humbled by such insipid characterizations, if only for the tormented alarm that registers on their faces when their habits are forcedly broken, heralding the death of reassurance and all things innocent. Complacency precedes disaster, so it's worth the wait.

Then a private chat window opens.

"You realize," a green bubble reads, "that you're just a neurotic, hypocritical infomaniac playing God?"

"I don't recall crowning myself king," Kanra types. "What's the matter, all of a sudden?"

"...Funny, you act like you own everything."

"It's in your best interest to temper your anger, which, as you know, is associated with high blood pressure and heart complications. I hear you're having financial trouble. Being a refugee doesn't pay well. But you're in luck; Japan provides universal health insurance!" Insert winking face.

There's a lull in conversation, but Izaya leaves the window open, idling.

"Bullshit."

"It's true!" He inserts a horrified face with his left hand and takes a call from a smuggler with the other.

"Then," Bakyura comments, "It must be lonely, bearing the burden of your vast, nauseating arsenal of ill-intentioned knowledge."

"No way!" an orange bubble pops up immediately, followed by a qualification.

"I mean, I'm practically the luckiest man alive."

Bakyura signs off.

Izaya snaps his phone shut, considering the jar before him with imperceptible unease. "You're cruel, Celty," he says wryly. "Wake up already. I'm convinced my contentment is illegal. My experiments are _much_ too fun to quit." Namie returns, but neither pays the other any attention.

"_So much fun_," he continues in a luxurious tone, leaning in, "that I want to _vomit_."

Namie acknowledges him at last. "Say, Izaya."

He blocks out Celty's nonresponsive head. "What?"

She brews a kettle of black tea. "You often claim that you love people."

He stands, sends a text, and beams. "Indeed. They're so spoiled, I can't help but despoil them."

"So it stands to reason," She ventures, her back to him, "that you would love yourself. Do you?"

A gravelly laugh. "It's an egoist's greatest honor."

That said, he straightens. "I have some business with terribly luckless smugglers. If they call about a ransom, hang up and dial Celty. She handles the tasteless ones."

She crosses her arms over her chest. "You have a cell phone. Won't you be able to pick up?"

Izaya smirks. "I have seventeen, actually."

Namie stares at him as he leaves.

.

_etc._

.

He finds himself spouting soliloquies in the company of Celty's decapitated head more often these days.

It doesn't calm him, nor drain him of the mania that wriggles out from his pores and urges him to seek interminable excitement in his game of life.  
His words are frank and casual, yet draw a curtain over the atmosphere, designating an untouchable space and time all to himself.

The domino effect has to begin somewhere, with something.

Victims will blame, the helpless will plea—but Izaya is not "in control."

He is the catalyst.

"The more wretched the crime, the more dire the salvation." He pauses for a sip of tea. "But Lucifers are seldom pardoned. Of course, the jury examines the defendant, and not the judge nor themselves. But in examining the defendant, they project their values into circumstances they hadn't possessed. Or—they project the circumstances into their values, thinking, '_What would I have done?_' Everything is reduced to argument. They kill and pray with eyes closed, and thus the labyrinth that is human beings. Opening your eyes to the world only alerts you to your susceptibility."

A demoniac grin slides into place. "Precisely where the fun begins."

He peeks out from the blinds as an unmistakable equestrian whinny roars past. "Would you choose Lucifer, Celty?"

But she never replies, and he is left to conceive of his own deus ex machina.

.

.

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end

* * *

**A/N: **First- the quote in the summary is attributed to Art Buchwald. And seventeen cell phones... that's what I call _artistic license_.

My first foray into this fandom- and I see that it's not as large as I thought it'd be, for such an amazing anime. I spent a good half-hour staring at the blank, white page in front of me before my fingers were able to move with words in mind. I've been thinking about this character ever since I finished the anime, because there's a lot about him that's just fascinating and I felt some sort of unshakeable pressure to do him justice (it kind of frightens me, actually, since the _writer_ is supposed to be in control...).

But I don't mean "fascinating" in a glorious, smoking-tip-of-the-gun way. He's fascinating, but... misaligned, somehow (besides the obvious, maniacal part, I mean). I'm not sure if I'm at liberty to perceive anything psychologically vulnerable about his wildly self-satisfied demeanor, but it's the antithesis of Shizuo's somewhat volatile but colorful contentment. People care about Shizuo. I'm not sure anyone would consider Izaya his/her "friend", much less support him without desiring something in return for all the trouble. Then again, I'm not sure Izaya would _want _the insecurity and predictability of being more stereotypically humanlike, since he seems to know enough about it to be snarky and cynical- above it, that is. But still- when he says he wants to vomit, I doubt that's a testament to his happiness. Vomiting is an awful sensation.

In summary: your feedback would be most welcome. I wanted to delve more into his character (i.e. write more), but I felt immensely insufficient, so I plan to mull all that is Izaya over in my brain when I should be thinking about kinetics and statistics. This will go over very well, oh yes.

Thank you for reading.

**edit: **Changed title from "Serpentine" to "Ad Infinitum" (to infinity), which I thought suited the theme better.


End file.
